“our choice of (for example) when to use abbreviations or not says so much about our tone but i could never explain it to someone who wouldn’t already “get” it? (because i don’t know how, not because it’s necessarily impossible). like there are differences, clear to me but impossible to articulate, between:
seriously?
vs.
srsly?
or:
are you serious right now?
vs. r u srs rn
which is not even getting into what?/what/WHAT/wat./WAT/wut
THE INTERNET IS SO COOL Y’ALL”
This is very true. And there are a hundred thousand microdialects of this kind of language out there, and this stuff changes all the time and very fast though there are overarching more slowly shifting principles someone cleverer (or more linguistics/communications inclined than me) could figure out.
Talking about doing qual research online you still get people saying “the problem is there are no non-verbal cues”. This is true inasmuch as - camming aside - there are no facial or body language cues to read and analyse. But there are tonal cues aplenty - a huge sprawling ever-expanding riot of them. Images, gifs, lexical variations, emoticons, hashtags, punctuation and spacing, the lack of punctuation, the lack of spacing, and that’s even before you get into the activity cues (who likes/who shares/who to).
Fifteen years ago there were people who said “I never use emoticons, they are for idiots”. Those people COMPLETELY LOST. Everything is an emoticon now - as in, it can be repurposed as something which carries contextual meaning in the same way.
How on earth would you analyse all that stuff though? I dunno! I think you have to be involved in it to some extent first and it’s not that easy even then. So ignore it? Well, on the one hand the really hardcore web-culture stuff isn’t mainstream, on the other hand the sort of immersive, interactive reflexive mode of communication epitomised by what?/what/WHAT/wut etc does show up in what people do on Facebook, Twitter etc all the time. If your field of research involves understanding influential people under 30 - and not all do or should - you really need to have some idea of it I think. Everyone else can wait ten years!
But here’s the thing - very little of this stuff is happening in online focus groups, or research communities, because it arises out of comfort in and control over an environment. This - not ‘interactivity’ or whatever - is what social media is really good at creating. It’s what researchers are often pretty bad at creating.
But not all researchers! Qualitative interviewers are very good at making people feel comfortable and in control. They understand that formality is often the enemy of understanding. So what would be great - no, actually, what IS great, since it’s already happening - is when qual-oriented people come through who are comfortable with and excited about online informality, instead of pretending it can’t exist.
